A neural network that spots similarities between programs could help computers code themselves

That's why some people think we should just get machines to program themselves. Automated code generation has been a hot research topic for a number of years. Microsoft is building basic code generation into its widely used software development tools, Facebook has made a system called Aroma that autocompletes small programs, and DeepMind has developed a neural network that can come up with more efficient versions of simple algorithms than those devised by humans. Even OpenAI's GPT-3 language model can churn out simple pieces of code, such as web page layouts, from natural-language prompts. Gottschlich and his colleagues call this machine programming.